Those barren leaves
Peter A ckroyd
oPie Will Always Be Kind Wilfred Sheed iweidenfeld and Nicholson £2.75) reci. At Gunter's Pamela Haines (Heinemann 2.25) 1,n The Springtime Of The Year Susan .Hill , itiamish Hamilton £2.25)._ 1 Critics will almost always be kind to Mr Sheed, and this latest novel is no rotten apple.
IS not everyone who can make polio sound like a cross between 'Laugh-In' and the first chapters of Tom Sawyer, but Sheed has naged it with the life-story of Brian Casey. 'It the age of sixteen, presumably when ex Pecting better things, this Irish Catholic discovers what his religion is all about: the question is, will he become just another March of Dimes poster? Remember that this narrative is set in New York during those iliark days of the War, but Brian is no slouch. he graduatls from nursing-home to Columbia ,university, that well-known haven for the abled, and it is here that Sheed leaves him . 'or the time being.
he reverend has a clean and precise prose;
sentences are short and generally to the !Joint, and there are some good albeit sickly Lokes ("Anybody want to play some football? (.7rifile we still got a leg to stand on?" says one ,, Casey's ungallant schoolfriends, in that „."Iviatlantic drawl to which Sheed has ob v`cluslY become accustomed). Casey takes an Understandable pleasure in kicking old ladies
and other do-gooders with his leg-irons, and
tchoere is a heartiness about the hero which tkines like a breath of clean anaesthesia after oge, novels of despair and desperation. It is onlY when Sheed's fantasies slacken that his ir,ose becomes rather more mean than tough.
nis
Of is all too obvious in the second part p eopie Will Always Be ,Kind, with the 2ergence of Sam Perkins, Harvard graduate esqlci speech writer to Brian Casey, Presidential „a_ndidate. Perkins is another do-gooder and raeral nonentity (Harvard having an especial llrn on the gang who can't live straight), faaticli not even Sheed can lift the grey veil of vied Panache. This is particularly the case soith the new Casey, a 'peace' candidate nriewhere between Franklin Roosevelt and oe Egg. e,tiS a great pity that political life is remely boring, and perhaps we should be 4teful to those few journalists and novelists in.° manage to make it sound even remotely 'cresting. But Sheed has invaded Casey with i,',,sriurious glamour, and as a result his writing eic,coines too slick and artful. He makes politi"s behave as politicians are always supto behave, with an indiscreet dash of itworiores and alcohol, and the second half of the saidvei becomes all too predictable: "'No,' c c dicta asey, 'It's different with peace can 16,tes. We have to outnice each other' ". as Snoopy would say. Or how to turn an -hero into a walking soap-opera. arnela Haines' first novel is set within the 4:11ePeriod, but you would never guess. Tea of. Gunter's is as discreet as its title, a world theYhispered passions and tinny violins with A refrain of "What shall we be .when we litrteni 't what we are?" The novel opens with wile Lucy in the tea-room, rapidly becoming 1110,akt she wasn't. Her life is grown by her 41.:Iler, Winifred, known as the "Duchess of ‘‘,1;ich!therton" after the small country town she divides without ruling; the Duchess s's in order to retreat annually to Gunter's
where she meets both faded past and lost love in the awkward shape of Gervase. It is into this charmed circle that Lucy is pushed by Mother, the first and last step being the White Rose academy for distressed secretaries where Lucy learns to make friends and influence people, especially a cetrain Richard, who is all an Englishman could hope to be — even being jilted at the last moment.
Pamela Haines has been able to evoke the distance without being 'enchanting'; the 'forties appear without nostalgia and cheap satire, right down to the coupons, the milkshakes and something known as a "bee's kiss." There is a genteel authority about the writing which saves the novel from excess, and Mrs Haines has the ability to raise characters at a stroke. There is Lucy's precocious chum, Elizabeth, all see-throughs and Mantovani: " ' ... And that cramped. A Rover's not a Baby Austin — but it's no double-bed, Lu.' She hiccuped again." And there is the Duchess herself, who is too complete a character to turn into a wicked fairy, and manages to become both unloved and yet lovable: "'Quality was something I just took for granted, Lucy'." This is a world that is forgotten but not gone, and I for one was touched by its mood.
This was not the case however, as Lucy claimed more and more attention within the narrative. The writing becomes to2 much a matter of the "I", and as the focus became more personal the imagination slackened. Richard is not half as real as Gervase, and Lucy is not half as real as her mother. It is a case of the child's imagination being, in this case, mother to the woman. Being knee-high to a tea-table is more evocative than being a young thing in crinoline, and even Winifred's memories of young men lounging under 1913 trees are far more real than Lucy's abortive 1949 picnics. Everyone in the novel is more interesting than its ostensible heroine and, although I would not place Haines in this leading role, it is often the quiet and embarrassed ones (like Lucy) who get their own back by writing about the rest of us. Susan Hill's latest novel is a simple story of everyday country folk. It is appropriate for a novel which goes back to the soil that every sentence should fall like a clod, but Nature can go too far. In The Springtime Of The Year is an elaborate dirge for Ben who has come and gone, and his young wife, Ruth, drags through her life and through this book with only the occasional break for natural functions. The story is continually grinding to a climax: Ruth relives the day of Ben's death, Ruth goes to Ben's funeral, Ruth has nightmares about Ben, Ruth weeps, Ruth picks flowers for Ben's grave, and finally Ruth discovers the 'truth' in all its banality. The narrative is littered with "true, good" and "wise" people, apples, hens, trees and the rest of the artificial machinery which Stella Gibbons parodied into oblivion some years back. To be a rustic Helen, woman of today, must be barely tolerable and Ruth does eventually go over the edge: "In the kitchen, she said 'I will cook them. The potatoes. I will cook them.' And she had spoken, almost cried the words aloud." This touching chorus, somewhere between Fanny Craddock and Phedre, is something of which any housewife would be proud, but it is rare for Ruth to express herself so intelligibly. We all know that country people are bursting with beautiful but inarticulate passions, and Ruth generally prefers sorrowful silence. It must be all that fresh air. But, even on these tenuous terms, Ruth is not a convincing creation. For someone who is, presumably, barely literate (wise and passionate people are above such things) she has a remarkably polysyllabic inner consciousness. I suspect that Miss Hill is cheating here, and it is a question of art concealing life. She would have made a better job of writing about the simple, everyday folk of Earl's Court.
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